So we have now finished Running In The Family and have moved onto discussing Marita Sturken’s essay Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, which covers the concept of cultural memory. I’d been really struggling with what to blog about – academic writing hasn’t quite got my mind working in the way other topics have. But when we discussed the idea of cultures that remember and forget, it confronts an issue I have been contemplating as a Brit.

I have never had to face reconciling my culture – I have never lived elsewhere before or have parents of different backgrounds. I am English, through and through. I was born in England to English parents with English ancestors, I live in a quaint village where we play cricket, drink tea and chat down the pub, I say things like ‘cheers’ and ‘mate’. I am, at my very core, a Brit.

However, more recently there are aspects of British culture that I am struggling with. Sturken discusses how what a nation forgets is as important as what it remembers, and that nations can have a culture of forgetting and a culture of remembering. In the UK, I feel that we are now at a changing point between the two.

Through all my years at school we learnt about the empire, but we were only taught about how awesome it was, about how much we benefitted and how much we gave to other societies – Britain was amazing. We didn’t learn about the other side involved, and until relatively recently I wasn’t aware that the empire wasn’t entirely the amazing thing I had been taught it was. Now, British curriculums are adapting in schools to include teaching the other side of the story – how it wasn’t exactly a sunny experience for all involved. Personally, I think this is a good thing. We should be aware of our nation’s missteps – otherwise how are we to learn from them? This also links to the identity of a ‘global citizen’ – someone who takes into account the lesser known stories, and focuses on their importance.

However, there is a lot of backlash to this in the UK. One organisation adamantly campaigning against this is the right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail. They’ve accused the British education system of being run by ‘lefty loonies’ intent on ‘cultural Marxism’, with a goal on indoctrinating the nation’s youth with an anti-Britain ideology (link, link). They are one for hyperbole. Some people in the UK, including our new foreign secretary Boris Johnson, have even described how leaving the EU can bring the resurgence of the British Empire (link) (link). I don’t really see how they plan on achieving this, but best of luck to them.

Depressingly, this hyper-nationalism is not a fringe belief in the UK at the moment. Much of the argument to leave the EU was based on ‘Making Britain Great Again’ (to put it in Trump terms), with Nigel Farage declaring June 23rd as our own ‘Independence Day’ (even though the Britain is what most countries actually celebrate their independence from, this tweet sums it up well). Recently Theresa May, our new Prime Minister, declared that “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” (link). We’ve sort of forgotten that other places exist, and are (dare I say) equally important.

One example, of an object with ‘cultural meaning’ that has been subject to controversy is the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College in Oxford. Cecil Rhodes was key figure of British imperialism, and served as the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. There was a campaign to have it removed, or to simply have a plaque next to it explaining the history behind Rhodes, and the suffering that many experienced because of him (he was key in implementing racial segregation). However, this was met with strong disagreement –  arguing that students were trying to ‘rewrite history’. Their argument was not that they were trying to rewrite history, but that figures with significant negative history should not be celebrated, as the impression of a statue gives. Ultimately, the students did not succeed in removing the statue, but the university has agreed to put up a plaque recognising his actions. Here, we’ve achieved some remembrance, which I think is a positive.

I hope that my country doesn’t continue down this path of blatant ‘strategic forgetting’, as Sturken mentions. I hope we learn more about the other side of the story, and that what we did in the past wasn’t always awesome. This is going to be tough in the current political climate we have in Britain, but I think it’s worth it.